


Winter taps

by HeleneBuff



Category: 20th Century CE RPF, Actor RPF, American Actor RPF, Astaire/Rogers RPF, Classic Hollywood Fandom, Dancers Fandom, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers - Fandom, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers Movies
Genre: 20th Century, American dancers, Dancers, F/M, Fred Astaire - Freeform, Fred Astaire x Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire&Ginger Rogers, Germany, Ginger Rogers - Freeform, RPF, WW2, World War II, classic Hollywood
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-18 07:22:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16113590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeleneBuff/pseuds/HeleneBuff
Summary: This is an alternative timeline.Fred&Ginger find themselves in war-torn Germany.What are they doing there, what will be their journey?Follow along, let's see together.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello there, my loveliest old movie friends, especially my fellow Fred&Ginger fans. :D  
> I did a thing.  
> A very intriguing idea about a Fred&Ginger fanfiction suddenly popped up in my head a couple of weeks ago and I just had to write it. It fascinates me so much to see where it takes me and it already means a lot to me.  
> I've been a fan of Fred&Ginger's for a while now and I love them so, so much. Our fandom is somewhat small but entirely unique. I loved all the fanfictions and videos and fanart and everything about them, a lot can be found on Tumblr too, this story as well.  
> I felt like I wanted to contribute something to it, so I started writing.
> 
> Now this is the first chapter, I’m currently working on the second. I’m very curious whether or not people might like it.  
> It’s very much set in an alternative timeline/ alternate universe and I hope you’ll forgive me that I took a lot of liberties to set it in my story.  
> If you are sensitive to painful scenarios around World War II, I advise you to take caution and possibly not read this because the rating will go up in further chapters. There will be emotionally difficult parts in this that take place during the end time of World War II.  
> It may be somewhat confusing at first but bear with me, it’ll become clearer as we go along and I hope I manage to tell it as thrillingly and with as much excitement as I feel when I see the story unfold in my head.
> 
> So I hope we’ll all enjoy as we move into the wintertime with this together. The story is filled with and based on actual events, inspired both by people I know and people I don’t know who have told their life stories. God bless them all.  
> I’ll try my best to stay as true as possible to their recount, the way they experienced their time.
> 
> I’ll try putting in a song at the beginning of my chapters too, I think it might be interesting for some to just hear the music and it also kinda gets you in the mood of the time and the place. I first have to figure out how that works though.  
> Again, if any of you are very sensitive to World War II related pictures and film documents, please do take caution or refrain from watching the video. It includes old film material from cities in Germany, so obviously there are swastikas visible in some cases. 
> 
> Now let's go and start walking with Freddie&Ginge! :)

I managed to edit in the video, I'm so glad! Please read the introduction to the story though, keep in mind, we're in War Time here so the songs and videos that correspond will have pictures from those times in them.

##  **Chapter 1**

####  _August 25th, 1944_  
  
The chandelier seemed to sway on the ceiling, gently back and forth, back and forth.  
It was somewhat intriguing but mostly very dizzying. She squint her eyes shut.  
Their show was successful.  
The house was crowded like every night, often people would even stand in the aisles to catch a glimpse of their act.  
She carefully opened her eyes again, the chandelier still seemed to swing. She let out a heavy sigh, the encore had really killed her tonight but she'd had to give it her utmost, she always did.  
The war had been raging for so long now, she didn't even remember anymore what looking into an audience of relaxed faces was like. She hadn't seen any for a good five years. The first rows in the Stadttheater were always filled with soldiers, either wounded or on furlough. At first she had found it difficult to look into those faces, bearing so much pain and terror in their features. But as they started to come in larger numbers, she had gotten so that she felt it was her duty to help them ease their pain, if only it was just for an evening.  
Yes, people came to see them sing and dance, it had been more than a year that they worked for the Stadttheater now, in changing revues of course but always challenging.  
This time they had only gotten one small dance routine together but it appeared to captivate people all the same.  
It seemed to her though, the whole ensemble was rather worn out from their supposed beacon in the darkness role, she was not the only girl laying panting on her back, almost all of her fellow dancing girls sat or lay on the stage, utterly exhausted, trying to catch their breath, trying to recover from the particularly strenuous evening show.  
In the end it had all been worth it though, the 5 minutes of thundering applause compensated immensely for their hard work and looking into the faces in front of her she was satisfied that most of them were actually smiling as if they had forgotten about the raging battlefields for the moment.  
  
With the next attempt now, she decided to pull herself together and prepared to open her eyes, just when she heard a tap right next to her and her lids snapped open immediately.  
She looked up and trying to focus, gazed right into a face smiling fondly down at her, hazel eyes holding a slight smirk at her dishevelled sight.  
He had a towel around his neck but his forehead was still very sweaty.  
“May I be of any assistance?”, he asked, extending his right hand to her nonchalantly.  
“Ugh!”, she huffed and shielded her eyes with her forearm.  
She smiled whimsically and glanced at him from under her arm as he squatted down to her.  
The world was not swirling in front of her eyes anymore, he was steady. Good, that was a start.  
“How can you be so bright and shiny after this arduous evening? I'm exhausted...”, she said recalcitrantly, jumping to her feet and promptly feeling faint.  
He grabbed her wrist very softly but very securely with his hand, it was so big that it seemed to almost swallow her forearm. She took it gratefully.  
“Are you alright, Ginge?”, he said softly now, his face gentle, bearing concern in its creases.  
She put her other hand on his right shoulder and smiled weakly but warmly at him: “I'm alright Freddie but let's go home, I need a bath and I need something to eat direly.”  
She clasped her head and he put his arm around her small waist and nodded quietly.  
Food was beginning to get scarce now but they were still lucky, they had a warm simple meal every evening.  
  
They went to their adjacent dressing rooms and got changed, then said their goodbyes and goodnights to their pals from the ensemble and stepped outside into the surprisingly chilly August night.  
The Paradeplatz lay in front of them, tautly quiet and dark, only lit by a few lanterns that were kept alight during the night.  
Fred inhaled deeply and shivered.  
He felt uneasy and glanced over at Ginger to his left. Her brows were slightly furrowed and she seemed slightly disconcerted herself.  
She felt his gaze and looked up at him, they exchanged something unspoken for a second. Then she grabbed his hand and he broke his stupor, squeezed her small hand and hailed a taxi.  
They drove through the dark for quite a while, passing many buildings whose windows showed only so much as a tentative shimmer of light, indicating that people still lived here.  
They passed big somber heaps of rubble too, quiet and haunting in the darkness, looming large at them as the car's dim headlamps touched upon them. Not too long ago houses had stood and people had lived there.  
Before the Russian bombardment had quenched the light.  
They passed the Botanic Garden, the dark silhouettes descending into the night.  
Their journey was spent in silence, both looking out of their windows, dwelling on their somber thoughts, holding hands absentmindedly in the middle of the seat.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I am again, dear friends of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and wouldn’t you know it, I actually have the new chapter ready. :)  
> Once again I have so many thoughts and feelings about Fred&Ginger and this story in general.  
> I just hope that you’ll enjoy the story now as we go on. I’ve tried to write it down as best as I could the way that I’ve seen things walking with Freddie and Ginge.  
> I have taken some liberties again but mind you, I have researched a lot too, so historically it is correct and I try to stay as true to the characters as I possibly can.
> 
> Now that being said, I will put a video before the chapter again (now that I know how) because I think it’s nice to get into the mood and it fits the story.  
> The song is from a movie from 1940 and is called “Mir geht’s gut”, which translates to “I’m fine”/ “I feel good”.  
> The male singer (and actor) Heinz Rühmann is very well known for his performances in the 1930s and 1940s and after. I remember already listening to this song when I was little.  
> There were also some remixes of his songs made in the 1990s and they're not half bad. I hope I’ll have the chance to post some of his other songs in further chapters.  
> I’ve chosen this one because I love his voice and his acting was hilarious, too. And because it goes with this chapter very well. I’ll give you a translation to the chorus because that is kinda important to the story.  
> Don’t worry, this time you can watch it without further ado, there’s only the two actors and the recordplayer visible. ;)
> 
> “Mir geht’s gut, ich bin froh  
> Und ich sag dir auch wieso:  
> Weil du mich gut verstehst.  
> Und mit Rat ,  
> und mit Tat  
> als mein guter Kamerad  
> mit mir durchs Leben gehst.  
> Ich will Freud und auch Leid mit dir teilen  
> Ohne dich fang ich gar nichts mehr an.  
> Mir geht’s gut, ich bin froh  
> und ich sag dir auch wieso:  
> Weil ich dein Freund sein kann!”
> 
> Translation:
> 
> “I feel fine, I’m happy  
> And I’ll gladly tell you why:  
> Because you understand me well.  
> And with advice  
> and with deed  
> as my good companion  
> go through life with me.  
> I want to share hapiness and sadness with you  
> Without you I don’t start a thing anymore.  
> I feel fine, I am happy  
> and I’ll gladly tell you why:  
> Because I can be your friend!”

Now for the chapter. I hope that you’ll like it and if you have any thoughts, ideas, criticisms, please let me know, I’d like to hear what you think. :)  
Thank you to 'StillAintNoGood' for the heartfelt and encouraging comment.  
I'd appreciate some more of this from you guys since it motivates me to continue posting and lets me know what people like to read, what I might improve.

 

**Chapter 2**

 

After about 20 minutes of driving, a softly lit farmhouse appeared in the distance.  
Its roof hunched down deeply over the outside walls but through the windows it looked welcomingly at its passerbys.  
The taxi came to a halt in front of a simple white fence.  
As they got out of the car they didn’t speak a word. Ginger paused for a moment to look at the moon while Fred was paying the driver.  
It was a graceful bright crescent and seemed almost peaceful in the clear, starry night.  
At the entrance gate Ginger linked arms with Fred and they watched the car speed away, back into town, back into the anxiously bickering lights of the night over Königsberg.  
The front garden lay dimly lit, the velvety dark shapes of beautiful roses and other lushly blooming flowers vaguely discernible in the darkness as they closed the gate behind them and strode up to the front door.  
The property was quiet at this hour, its extents hardly estimable as most of it rested tranquilly, concealed by the dark.  
They didn’t have to knock on the old door, whose white varnish was slowly chipping off the wood.  
It gently opened and through a small crack, his aunt Klara peeked at them cautiously.  
Not a second later she ripped the door wide open with a big smile, now assured who her late arrivals were.  
“Frederick, Gini, wie schön, dass ihr da seid!”  
It had taken Ginger a while to get accustomed to hearing a different language around her most of the time but meanwhile she had learnt some words of German and understood easy conversations.  
To her great fortune, aunt Klara knew some basic English since her sister had settled down in the United States and they still kept in touch.  
Her husband and both of her sons were deployed at the Eastern Front and not a day passed by when she didn’t pray insistently for them to come home alive, checking the mailbox at least twice a day, hoping that a letter with good news would eventually arrive or hoping that there weren’t any bad news at least.

She hugged Fred and Ginger tightly and bade them in.  
Ginger found her to be very warm and open-hearted in spite of the great sorrow that she was burdened with.  
Although not having known her at all, Klara had just treated her as part of the family from the moment they arrived. She had given them a beautiful little bedroom that looked onto the vegetable garden in the back.  
Whenever they had some time off from work, they tried to help her with the farming as best as they could, watering the plants, feeding the cattle, making hay or milking the cows.  
They weren’t exactly made for hard physical farming work, Ginger’s frail little frame had not seldom been swallowed by an enormous heap of hay that was flopped down from the hayloft by the farm hands as they were helping to feed the cows and sheep downstairs. Fred always had a good laugh leaning upon his rake, watching her reemerge from the jumble, pitchfork first.  
Until a tuft of hay landed in his face that she had flung decidedly.  
Unsurprisingly they worked very well together and complemented each other in their tasks so that they managed to actually be of some help to aunt Klara.  
She needed every helping hand she could get, being left to care for their farm all alone until hopefully one day her men would return.

As things had gotten more and more serious with the war expanding further towards Russia, the German offensive eventually getting painfully bogged down near Stalingrad and no end in sight, Fred had made a decision.  
His beloved mother had been receiving word from East Prussia increasingly often, her sister Klara almost begging for someone to come over for at least a few weeks, fearing that all on her own, she might lose their family home entirely, should the Eastern Front get lost and her husband and her sons never return home.

Fred hadn’t seen his aunt often when they were young, maybe two or three times, but he felt a strong connection to his mother’s family’s roots and had fallen in love with the beautiful old farmhouse and the delightsome estate around it back when he was a boy.  
In those days, he had played with the cows a lot as they were lazily chewing on the grass, his sister Dellie trying to chase him over the pasture and they ended up trying to ride the cattle, landing their butts in cowpats in return.  
He had felt a freedom there that he was sure no other place had ever matched.  
It was where his mother came from, his ancestors had lived here for generations.  
He was very determined to help keep it, maybe one day for his own children to come visit the place, which meant so much to his family and had seen so many faces of the strand that wove into the history of their descendance.

So he had declared without further ado that he would go on the journey to East Prussia to try his luck there for a while in the middle of the war.  
His family was shocked to say the least, he was just starting to become a big star of the dancing business in the States and no one knew how much further the war-mongering German government would even go.  
Over there he would be barely known and would have to start anew almost entirely.  
When asked if he would go alone, he disclosed with some apprehension that he wanted to take Ginger with him. Gasps of horror at the prospect of him dragging her along followed promptly.  
They had only just gotten engaged after long and bone-grinding debates over it for weeks until she had finally given in, assured now that he wouldn’t make her his side-kick and that she wouldn’t want to overrule his artistic ambitions.  
It took a while but they were both much too headstrong to let themselves be led off solely by their deep affection for each other.  
Yet they had spoken and most importantly danced it out and found themselves both smiling coyly at each other out of the corner of their eyes afterward, overcome with the realization that their bodies moved as one already and they were merely complicating a decision that had been made long ago.

He had told her of his plans and although he didn’t ask her to come with him, she was overwhelmed by it for a moment.  
Her own career had only just started to flourish and she was becoming someone in the circles of Hollywood. But she heard his reasons and she felt he knew what he was doing.  
He assured her it would only be for a short period of time, half a year at most.  
She doubted that immediately but she wasn’t going to leave his side for that long either.  
He was obviously crazy to go to Germany at this point in time and with nothing to look forward to but harsh struggle and an unclear ending.  
Her mother would revolt against her but eventually have to give in as she never managed to change her tenacious daughter’s mind once it was set.  
But was it set?  
She didn’t like her alternatives then.  
Giving up her ambitions was not an option, they had only just established that and Fred wasn’t going to ask her such.  
But leaving him to go on his own wasn’t an option either.  
It was only after a good 10 minutes of lip-chewing and silence on her part that he finally spoke.  
He shyly offered: “Gin, if you…if you’re thinking about coming with me, I have spoken to RKO. The executives offer us a contract. If we come back with a good new story and a couple of dance routines within the next two years, they’ll have us playing the lead in a new picture. They liked the idea of a war-centered story and ‘based on facts’ seems to sell pretty well.”  
She had looked at him incredulously, stunned for a moment.  
It was a prospect at least. And she trusted him.  
Not merely because she had to, but if dancing with him had told her one thing then that he wouldn’t let her slip, that he knew where to lead and that he danced her along safely.  
So it was a deal.  
The adventurous side of her got most excited at what unknown challenges she was going to face and what experiences she was going to make alongside with Fred, not least because she would get to know more of his family and their history.

They had signed the contract a week later, obligating themselves to send regular reports on their journey and structured concepts for dancing routines.

Lela Rogers had indeed almost lost her faith in good rationale when Ginger had finally confided in her about her plans.  
She tried to put up a valiant fight but had to give up soon because her daughter wouldn’t budge.  
They quarrelled for a while until Lela had the striking idea of having Fred come over and swear on the Bible and everything he held sacred, that he would bring her back safely, keep her from all harm and they report to her weekly how things were holding up.  
Passably satisfied, she gave them both her blessings and a snivelling hug and wished them well.

Fred’s family was caught up in their own worry. This venture was unsafe and a setback to his career, but his mother understood. Eventually she understood and his sister forced herself to calm down from her emotional outburst.  
They both had tears in their eyes but conceded and wished him the best of luck on the promise he come back as soon as he could or as soon as things got too dangerous to stay for them both.  
He had given them the promise, relieved that they would wish him well and even showed a sense of pride in him putting their family matters to such high importance.  
He knew at least his mother missed her old home everyday and she would love to be able to return one day even if it was only for a short stay.

So it was set, he wasn’t planning on staying long anyways, he would help aunt Klara settle the matters at hand and leave as soon as things were back in order enough that she could take care of the estate herself.  
Little did he know what truly awaited him when they arrived in Königsberg.  
It hadn’t been planned either for them to grow so fond of the place and so close to aunt Klara that they just couldn’t bring themselves to leave either of them as of yet.


End file.
